Of biscuits, broken and whole
Text & Images – Manjari Chakravarti
Volume 3 | Issue 10 [February 2024]
At the window of a ground floor flat in Calcutta (this was 1966), a very small child with big eyes sits, biting into a thin arrowroot biscuit. She is engrossed in the life bustling right outside the window. When the crow alights onto the window sill, she freezes. The crow is as large as she is. In a blink, the bird has grabbed the biscuit through the window grille and has made its exit. The child proceeds to bawl loudly.
This memory of mine is one of the earliest and clearest. The biscuits in our home were kept in a round tin with a domed blue lid. The tin had a bustling rural market scene painted on it and had arrived as a birthday gift, perhaps, filled with a variety of biscuits (not cookies, not yet). Now it held mostly Marie or Thins, Horlicks biscuits and Parle G biscuits. Our teacups sat on the one table in the room. I remember the small enamel lids that covered each one – a dusky pink one, a powder blue one and a yellow one, each with its deep blue rim.
Rainy school mornings, the smell of petrol fumes, traffic moving wetly outside, the inevitable rickshaw ride to school … but not yet, not yet. First, hot tea, and later, breakfast. Besides the Thins and the Maries, were the comforting Circus biscuits, all different, with ballerinas on tightropes, and lions and clowns, closely inspected each morning, and loved afresh.
And square cottage cream biscuits with the sweet lemon cream pouting out of the four-paned windows, and a stream flowing under a little bridge and a forest behind it all, all in raised wheaten golden brown into which I often found myself disappearing, far away from the phenyl- smelling despair that school was.
It was a pity to dip those into hot cups of tea. But it was an art learned early on. Of not losing the biscuit to the tea when dipped, once, twice.
That first Christmas, the small tree sat on the same table. Under it we found packets of Nutties and little round biscuits from the small shop nearby, both ecstatically received. Life was simple. Small things; and joy was always around the corner.
The other day I was talking to Nayantara about the Nice biscuits that were sold in tin boxes, very pretty ones with roses printed on them. Inside were crinkly noodles of paper, with the sugar-sprinkled coconutty biscuits nestled within.
It’s hard to relate that those biscuits nowadays come so casually packed in foil with nothing special about them.
There was so little plastic in the Seventies- always the tins and the brown paper packets with biscuits leaving their buttery patches on the paper. Inside, ginger nut cookies baked a deep brown, low on sugar, high on ginger and breaking with a loud snap between the teeth. Religiously bought only from that little shop in Gariahat Market, where, to the back were stacks of comics and books, all secondhand, waiting to be bought or borrowed. Round jam biscuits, sandwiched with cream. If you held the jam centre up to the sunlight it glowed ruby red like a stained-glass window. It was sacrilege to bite into a whole one. You had to separate the two halves, lick the cream off, carefully extricate the button of jam, eat the biscuit halves by now soggy from the licking and finally, there was the rubbery bit of jam melting swiftly on the tongue.
Cheeselings, small cheesy pillows of air- a fistful was nothing- we told ourselves they were mostly air anyway, and then proceeded to finish them all. Monaco biscuits, on which we struggled to balance a slice of egg, a bit of cheese and a dot of tomato sauce like the advertisement on the back cover of the Illustrated Weekly. Jeera biscuits. Kaju biscuits: each time you were sad that they weren’t in fact, real roasted cashews.
Wholesome nankhatai in ghee-stained brown paper packets, brought house to house in Lucknow.
Years later, the journey to Santiniketan. The early Eighties.
Badam biskoot, crumbly flat round biscuits full of soda and sprinkled with peanuts and reminiscent of Santiniketan dusk, of evenings spent listening to stories shared by Leela Majumdar sitting in her round verandah, sipping tea, biting into the badam biskoots while the Shampa dhoop, long fat green sticks of mosquito repellent smoked gently in the corner and the crickets sang their song in the darkness outside.
Dildaar and Qurban selling fresh baked biscuits from a basket on their head- Lombus which were more buns, really, filled with coconut. Modon kotkoti, which were spicy biscuit cubes, coated with rock salt and chilli powder. At night, they sold their bread and biscuits from a small glass-windowed cart, an oil lamp dimly illuminating the red gravel road, moving from door to door and disappearing into the mist-shrouded October night.
Three decades back when this town had three television sets and two cars, Troyee was the shop where we bought everything.
In that shop, Ganesh-da sold tea, rice, soap, oil, brooms, face cream, sugar and biscuits. The biscuits came wholesale in large tins, and had often broken in transit.
These broken biscuits he mixed up and sold by weight to college students, who bought them to save money. You never knew what you would get in your packet- a lucky dip of sorts.
For a couple of rupees, you got a paper packetful – among the crisp, golden brown jagged crumby bits of Marie biscuits which are the blandest biscuits in the universe, lurked almost-whole chocolate bourbon biscuits, a few half-moons of jam-centred jimjams, a morsel of lemon cream puff, some shards of ginger cookies, and some coconut butter cookies too. These we picked out and ate, and fed the bits of Marie to the birds, squirrels and dogs. Sometimes luck favoured you and you got more chocolate bourbon bits but sometimes you were unlucky and you spent a while feeding hungry squirrels, watching them grab the pieces, and stuff them into their mouths.
Just yesterday at Mamu’s shop I came across some biscuits in the familiar transparent wrapping labelled MILK TOST which serves as a wrapping for almost everything Billada’s Bakery sells. Billada is the oldest little food factory in Bolpur town. I had never seen these fat biscuits before, so I bought a packet.
A man standing there said “we ate these biscuits when we were children. They were soft, and filled with coconut. The bakers sold them going house to house, baskets on their heads.” I came back home and ate a few- flaky outside, cakey inside, fresh and coconutty, very low on sweet – quite delicious.
I had asked Mamu what they were called. “Russian cakes” he had said.
Exquisitely delightful story about the taste, smell, feel and range of biscuits we had. What an excellently depicted narrative about biscuits ! Felt like sharing a cup of hot tea and a piece of Marie biscuit with the author herself !
Thank you so much for your lovely words, Sarbani
Maybe one day we will have a cha adda with thin arrowroot biscuits!
Delicious piece of writing!
Thank you so much for your lovely words, Sarbani
Maybe one day we will have a cha adda with thin arrowroot biscuits!
Thank you Prasanna!
So lovely to read, Manjari. You paint such delicious pictures with your words!
Thanks for your lovely feedback Dipali, as always
You are a wizard with your words, drawings and memories Manjari!!! What a delightful recollection, transporting us to our childhood!!
So kind, BB as always
So much love. Here’s to shared memories!
I’d saved this for the illustrations, but I loved reading this so much Manjari. Balancing toppings on Monaco just like the ads brought memories rushing in.
Thanks so much Priya! And yes, we got really creative with the toppings, it was seriously funny
Lyrical…hits the memories button with the first few lines…love it!
Shala, thanks for your lovely feedback, as always !
Naustalgia! Lovely piece, such golden memories of a simple childhood where biscuits were star attractions. Sketches are so good adding a visual treat.
Thank you Buchku Di, yes it’s so strange now to think how special those simple treats were us to then! And everything tasted so good!
Bringing so much biscuit memory back. Such a delightful read and so evocative. I’m only sorry that you never experienced the trunk walla in 60s Jamshedpur! The rest of it sheer unbridled nostalgia!
Lovely piece. Immediately remembered Ansari who went about with his peti of goodies, even veg patties that were impatiently waited for in Cheap Kuthi lunch break.